


Waffles

by starspoiler



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Light Angst, Mashed Potatoes, Waffles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-08 18:37:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15936029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starspoiler/pseuds/starspoiler
Summary: Stephanie Brown loves waffles, apparently.





	Waffles

**Author's Note:**

> I saw somewhere that Steph's comfort food is/was actually mashed potatoes, so...  
> This isn't proof-read, and I wrote in approximately 3 hours. I hope you can't tell.

Stephanie Brown is young, and her dad just got put into jail for the first time. Her mom is sad, in a happy sort of way.

 

Stephanie herself is not sad—not at all. She wouldn’t say she was happy, but she would say that if she spent the rest of her life without ever seeing Arthur Brown again, she wouldn’t regret a single thing.

 

When they come home from the GCPD building, Crystal microwaves fish sticks and makes mashed potatoes from powder, and Stephanie does not eat the fish sticks. She eats the mashed potatoes, and promptly falls asleep at the table, and her mom carries her to her bed.

 

The next morning, Crystal makes waffles.

  
  


Stephanie remembers the mashed potatoes, she does not remember the waffles.

  
  
  
  


There’s a restaurant, right in the center of Gotham, run by a nice old lady and her two grandchildren, and Stephanie goes there all the time.

 

All. The. Time.

 

It’s open from 4 in the morning to 11 at night, which makes it the perfect spot for a busy college student slash vigilante.

 

The restaurant sells breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the breakfast is sold all day. 

 

Stephanie Brown gets lots of different things—she’s never found something she didn’t like—but she always circles it back to their mashed potatoes.

 

They were  _ really good _ .

  
  


Spoiler, though, never got mashed potatoes.

 

She got waffles, because they were cheap and were sold all the time, but also because the old woman mentioned offhand once that Stephanie really was the only one who was that in love with the mashed potatoes, and that would be a dead giveaway of her identity

  
  
  
  


The only time that the Batman Family really saw her eat as Spoiler, and they all knew the only thing she ordered was waffles, so the assumption was that she  _ really liked _ waffles.

  
  
  
  


When Arthur Brown was put in jail for the second time, Barman took Spoiler to dinner.

 

For waffles.

 

At a waffle house, not even at the restaurant she likes, but at a  _ waffle house. _

 

She doesn’t know what to say, so she nods along with it and digs herself deep into that hole

  
  
  
  


When she’s Robin, Dick invites her to have dinner with him.

 

She doesn’t know where they were going until it’s too late, and they’re at a Waffle House again, and Dick says something about Bruce telling him that she likes waffles and she dies a little inside before agreeing.

 

Even though waffles aren’t her favorite, the dinner was fun and she enjoyed herself more than she had eating dinner with someone for a long time.

  
  
  
  


After Stephanie comes back to life, she finds herself going to the restaurant, but since she’s Spoiler, and technically Stephanie Brown is dead, and maybe she’s being paranoid, but she can’t order what she wants (mashed potatoes) and instead orders what she is expected to order (waffles).

 

She can’t say that they’re  _ bad. _

 

In fact—they are quite good.

  
  
  
  


In a half hearted attempt to try to be better friends with Damian, she invites him to dinner at the restaurant with her. He doesn’t order waffles (he orders frech toast, for whatever reason), so it’s technically the perfect excuse to  _ not _ get waffles.

 

She gets waffles anyway.

  
  
  
  


One day, she’s having a particularly bad time and she thinks the only possible way to cure her sadness would be to have the mashed potatoes. She finds that they no longer have the mashed potatoes on the menu. When she asks, the old woman says that only one person ever really bought them, and that she’s gone now and it would’ve hurt too much to keep it there. She’s smiling, but there’s sadness in her eyes, and Stephanie’s feels a pang in her chest.

 

  
The feeling that she made that sort of effect on somebody’s life overpowered the sad feeling she should’ve felt at the loss.

 

She orders waffles.

  
  
  
  


When Damian dies, she doesn’t think she’d be able to make it.

 

She doesn’t know where she’s going, but when she finds herself at the restaurant, she’s not surprised.

 

Numbly, she orders waffles, and they taste like nothing, but somehow, she finds herself enjoying them.

  
  
  
  


Damian comes back and, however much he’ll deny it, he’s not the same—in a bad way.

 

And she gets it. She gets it more than anybody else (except maybe Jason) so she does the only thing she can think of.

 

She invites him to dinner and this time they both order waffles.

  
  


It’s nice.

  
  
  
  


Later, she realizes that, without her noticing, her love for waffles had grown, and changed into something even more, and that almost all of her truly good memories are surrounded with waffles, and she’s okay with that.


End file.
